Think Outside the Cage

Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition

Who is the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition?

Our mission is to reverse the trend of mass incarceration in Colorado. We are a coalition of nearly 7,000 individual members and over 100 faith and community organizations who have united to stop perpetual prison expansion in Colorado through policy and sentence reform.

Our chief areas of interest include drug policy reform, women in prison, racial injustice, the impact of incarceration on children and families, the problems associated with re-entry and stopping the practice of using private prisons in our state.

Friday, October 16, 2015

David Stojcevski died
in jail in Macomb County, Mich., a far suburb of Detroit, last year. He
was taking doctor-prescribed methadone and two anti-anxiety medicines to
alleviate symptoms of drug withdrawal when he began a 30-day sentence
in June 2014. His family alleges
that officials at the jail did not respond to his pleas for his
medicines. He began hallucinating and was placed in a special cell with 24-hour camera surveillance.
(Local 4 television in Detroit first showed the video. A warning:
Watching will produce nausea and outrage.) There he lay for 16 days,
naked, on the floor. He lost 44 pounds. Finally he stopped breathing,
was taken to a hospital and pronounced dead.

Guards are required to monitor the cell cameras, taking notes every 15 minutes. They watched Stojcevski for days as he died.

But this isn’t a story
about horrendous jail practices, although the lessons should be
obvious. Rather, the point is that Stojcevski received a death sentence
for a traffic ticket: He had been arrested for obstruction of justice
when he couldn’t pay a $772 fine for reckless driving.

His death is an
extreme consequence of cash-register justice, a practice that ruins
lives across the country every day in less dramatic ways.

And this is a story about a possible remedy: Make fines proportional to an offender’s ability to pay.

About a dozen
countries in Latin America and Europe use such fines, called day fines.
In countries where their use has been studied, day fines have markedly
reduced the number of people incarcerated, made the criminal justice
system fairer and less abusive to the poor, lowered recidivism and saved
government money.

Day fines were tried
in a handful of cities in the United States a quarter-century ago. They
didn’t catch on, in part because the political climate was uncongenial:
It was the peak of lock-’em-up sentiment. But America no longer wants to
lock up every offender. Today, there is a rare bipartisan consensus on
the harm created by mass incarceration.

So it’s time to take a serious new look at the day fine.

First, why we need it:

In America, people are
routinely jailed for failure to pay fines. Since the 1990s, courts in
many parts of the country have had to pay for themselves, or even
support their cities, so fines can be exorbitant. Ferguson, Mo., is the
most notorious example: “Ferguson’s law enforcement practices are shaped
by the city’s focus on revenue rather than by public safety needs,”
said the Justice Department’s report on the police and courts in
Ferguson.

Someone pulled over
for a missing taillight can be given multiple fines, plus court fees
that might equal or exceed the original fines. If the accused can’t pay,
her case may be turned over to a private company that supervises
“pay-only probation” — bill collecting, really. The company collects the
money and charges the offender for doing so. (Here’s an excellent summary
of the process, written in plain English.) The offender could pay off
her whole fine and still owe thousands of dollars. If she doesn’t pay,
she could go to jail, which would probably mean losing her job.

Cash-register justice
incarcerates or keeps on probation many people who are not dangerous,
just poor. And taxpayers are being abused by legislators who keep
heaping fees on offenders. The lawmakers are not considering the
enormous cost of jailing those who can’t pay, the cost of collecting
their debts, or the cost to society of turning a civil violator into an
incarcerated criminal.

“I don’t think
legislators know this is not working — that the fees on the books are
costing more money than they are bringing in,” said Karin Martin, an
assistant professor of public management at the John Jay College of
Criminal Justice in New York. The Brennan Center for Justice at the New
York University School of Law, for example, looked at
the incarceration of 246 people in Mecklenburg County, N.C., who fell
behind on their court debt. The county collected $33,476, but jailing
them cost $40,000.

Legislatures should
not be making courts pay for themselves. It creates terrible injustice
and ruins lives. It perverts justice by giving courts an incentive to
convict. But if judicial systems are going to be made to pay their own
way, it should be done fairly.

One way is to use the
day fine. Rather than a set dollar amount, it is a percentage or
multiple of an offender’s daily income — hence the name. In some
countries, “daily income” is simply after-tax earnings. Others adjust
for the number of dependents or fixed obligations like child support,
and some consider only what is earned above a basic living allowance.

In the United States,
for example, a very minor offense carrying a fine of one day’s income
might cost a minimum-wage earner $72 if based only on straight income,
while someone with an annual income of $250,000 might pay $685. A more
serious offense could carry a fine of 10 or 20 days’ income, or more.
For the system to function, additional court fees should also be
proportional to income.

Different fines for
different people — is that fair? Compared with the current system, yes.
Even $500 for a traffic fine and fees can ruin the life of a
minimum-wage worker. For someone who makes $250,000 a year, that same
fine is a minor inconvenience, and an ineffective deterrent to further
violations. The rich are more likely to drive recklessly, and they can put a fine on a credit card without a thought. Same offense – two very different punishments.

But with a day fine, an offense would carry a similar punitive hit for rich and poor.

Germany is probably
the biggest user of day fines. In 1975, the government of what was then
West Germany adopted the practice because it wanted to reduce prison
overcrowding, and because research had shown that low-level offenders
jailed for short times emerged more violent and dangerous. Offenders
were no longer given short sentences, but rather fines that were
adjusted for income.

In 2010, Germany used
day fines in more than 94 percent of traffic offenses and in a vast
majority of crimes that would otherwise have drawn short jail sentences,
like fraud, embezzlement and theft.

An early study, published in 1980 by Hans-Jorg Albrecht of the Max Planck Institute, found that the fines were more effective than short sentences at preventing future offenses.

Since day fines are
calculated to be bearable, collection rates are much higher than with
traditional fines. But they still require enforcement – in Germany’s
case by means of other civil (not criminal) sanctions like the seizure
of property, the garnisheeing of wages or the imposition of a sentence
of community service. Nonpayers go to jail very rarely.

Last month in Brooklyn, a homeless teenager was
arrested for jumping a turnstile. He had been arrested a few times
before, so the judge set bail at $250. The teenager could not pay it. He
was sent to Rikers Island jail to wait for trial. He was there for
about two weeks.

We hear stories like this with unacceptable
regularity. They may not generate the same attention that Sandra Bland’s
and Kalief Browder’s stories did, but they should inspire the same
outrage. Even one night spent in jail because of poverty is too many.

We are at a tipping point. Many jurisdictions are attacking the inequities associated with cash bail – Hawaii and New Jersey last year, and New York State Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman
just last week. New York City is, too. In the Mayor’s Office of
Criminal Justice, we are already working to eliminate bail for low-risk
groups, and more is in the offing.

The low-risk defendant facing a low-level charge,
detained on bail of $1,000 or less, should wait for trial at home, not
behind bars. But this group is only 7 percent of the population jailed
on bail in New York City.

The bigger question is what we do with the other
93 percent. These 44,000 people are still stuck with a bail system in
which how much money someone has determines whether they are detained.
If some of these individuals pose a risk to public safety, they should
be detained. But the problem with money bail is that it can lead to
unnecessary jail time if low-risk people cannot afford to pay bail. Just
as troubling, it could also lead to high-risk people being able to pay
bail and return to the street.

Before we spend money and time funding additional
pilot projects, we need to understand the bigger, systemic problems that
plague money bail. Until we do, reform attempts will be nothing more
than whack-a-mole. On Tuesday we launched the Bail Lab to do just that.

The point of the Bail Lab is to scout ideas from
across the country, and test them. An advisory board of leading experts
on bail will guide us, but we have also opened an online hub that
invites everyone – from tech start-ups to people with a family member
behind bars – to ‘crowdsource’ bail reform. Help us map the problems
with money bail. Help us test solutions. And then help us implement what
works in New York City and share what we learn with other states and
cities nationwide.

First up are experiments to answer the fundamental
question of whether money is actually the best way to get people to
return to court. The anecdotal evidence suggests the opposite may in
fact be true. Most people – 93 percent in New York City – who are
released without bail or other conditions before trial return to court
within 30 days of their scheduled court date. And the Bronx Freedom Fund
– a charitable organization that posts bail for clients facing
misdemeanor charges – has had 97 percent of its clients successfully
return to court since 2013. This suggests that cash deposits may not
actually be necessary to ensure that defendants return to court.

To test that proposition, we will take defendants
who have been bailed out by a charitable fund and randomly try various
incentives to get them to show up for their court dates: texting
reminders, involving family members, engaging defense counsel more
actively, and other devices.

What we learn will be shared with judges, to make
them aware of the choices they have. We will also work with the courts
to gather data on the outcomes of bail – how many defendants with bail
set at $250 go to jail? – so that judges can have access to information
about what happened to cases. This will create an important feedback
loop judges have been wanting.

New York City’s pre-trial system works well for
many. We are a national leader in the percentage of defendants – 68
percent – who wait for trial at home, without conditions like
supervision or money bail. Most of these defendants return for their
trial date. Only 14 percent of defendants in New York City are held on
bail. And for those who do have bail set, our system, for the most part,
fairly matches bail amounts to the seriousness of the offense: 73
percent of defendants charged with a misdemeanor have bail set under
$1000.

Despite these successes, our bail system – like
others across the country – is driven largely by guesswork instead of
science, with bail amounts often mismatched to defendants’ financial
situation and the risk they pose. Courts often do not have the tools to
make sure that bail does not lead to unnecessary detention for low-risk
people and that release is not done at the expense of public safety.
Someone who is a danger to others should be detained.

We are also testing how to speed up and simplify
the bail payment process. Even though New York City sets bail amounts
that are appreciably lower than the national average, only 10 percent of
people are able to pay bail at arraignment. Another 30 percent make
bail after arraignment, most within one week. Through experiments, we
are identifying whether measures like allowing defendants to pay with a
credit card would enable more people to post bail before they are
booked into jail. If we can improve the process for posting bail, we can
avoid the increased risk of recidivism that has been associated with
just a few days in jail, as well as the sky-high costs of incarceration.

And there are other barriers we may be able to eliminate:

When someone is arrested, his cell phone is
confiscated. That makes it much harder to contact family and friends and
arrange bail before being transferred to jail.

The buses to Rikers leave from the courts on a
regular schedule. If someone has bail set three hours before the bus
goes, he has three hours to arrange bail. If he is arraigned 15 minutes
before the bus leaves, chances are he’s going to jail.

We cannot afford to get bail reform wrong. The
momentum spreading across the country right now is important and a long
time coming, and we cannot settle for partial solutions. While money
bail is still with us, we need to make it an accurate and productive
21st century public safety tool instead of a blunt and archaic
instrument. But this process must be driven by science.

Elizabeth Glazer is the director of the New York City Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice.

For more on New York’s earlier bail reforms, see here. For a contrary view, see here.

Originally Filed
Thursday, October 15, 2015 at 7:15 a.m. ET

Opening StatementThe best criminal justice news from around the web, delivered daily.

Tuesday, July 28, 2015

Finally after two decades prisoners will be allowed to take college classes. More information will be available on Friday when the official announcement comes from the White House Wall Street Journal

By

Josh Mitchell and

Joe Palazzolo

Updated July 27, 2015 7:32 p.m. ET

The Obama
administration plans to restore federal funding for prison inmates to
take college courses, a potentially controversial move that comes amid a
broader push to overhaul the criminal justice system.
The plan,
set to be unveiled Friday by the secretary of education and the attorney
general, would allow potentially thousands of inmates in the U.S. to
gain access to Pell grants, the main form of federal aid for low-income
college students. The grants cover up to $5,775 a year in tuition, fees,
books and other education-related expenses.
Prisoners received
$34 million in Pell grants in 1993, according to figures the Department
of Education provided to Congress at the time. But a year later,
Congress prohibited state and federal prison inmates from getting Pell
grants as part of broad anticrime legislation, leading to a sharp drop
in the number of in-prison college programs. Supporters of the ban
contended federal aid should only go to law-abiding citizens.

Thursday, July 16, 2015

EL RENO, Okla. — They opened the door to Cell 123 and President Obama
stared inside. In the space of 9 feet by 10, he saw three bunks, a
toilet with no seat, a small sink, metal cabinets, a little wooden night
table with a dictionary and other books, and the life he might have
had.

As
it turns out, there is a fine line between president and prisoner. As
Mr. Obama became the first occupant of his high office to visit a
federal correctional facility, he said he could not help reflecting on
what might have been. After all, as a young man, he had smoked marijuana
and tried cocaine. But he did not end up with a prison term, let alone
one lasting decades.

“There but for the grace of God,” Mr. Obama said after his tour. “And that is something we all have to think about.”

Close to one in every 12 black men ages 25 to 54 are imprisoned, compared with one in 60 nonblack men in that age group.

Mr.
Obama came here to showcase a bid to overhaul America’s criminal
justice system in a way none of his predecessors have tried to do, at
least not in modern times. Where other presidents worked to make life
harder for criminals, Mr. Obama wants to make their conditions better.

With
18 months left in office, he has embarked on a new effort to reduce
sentences for nonviolent offenders; to make it easier for former
convicts to re-enter society; and to revamp prison life by easing
overcrowding, cracking down on inmate rape and limiting solitary
confinement.

What
was once politically unthinkable has become a bipartisan venture. Mr.
Obama is making common cause with Republicans and Democrats who have
come to the conclusion that the United States has given excessive
sentences to too many nonviolent offenders, at an enormous moral and
financial cost to the country. This week, Mr. Obama commuted the sentences of 46 such prisoners and gave a speech calling for legislation to overhaul the criminal justice system by the end of the year.

He
came to the El Reno Federal Correctional Institution on Thursday to get
a firsthand look at what he is focused on. Accompanied by aides,
correctional officials and a phalanx of Secret Service agents, he
crossed through multiple layers of metal gates and fences topped by
concertina wire to tour the prison and talk with some of the nonviolent
drug offenders he says should not be serving such long sentences.

The
prison was locked down for his visit. He was brought to Cell Block B,
which had been emptied for the occasion. Only security personnel were
outside on the carefully trimmed grass yards. The only inmates Mr. Obama
saw were six nonviolent drug offenders who were selected to have a
conversation with him recorded by the news organization Vice for a
documentary on the criminal justice system that will air on HBO in the
fall.

But
those six made an impression. “When they describe their youth and their
childhood, these are young people who made mistakes that aren’t that
different from the mistakes I made and the mistakes that a lot of you
guys made,” Mr. Obama told reporters afterward. “The difference is, they
did not have the kind of support structures, the second chances, the
resources that would allow them to survive those mistakes.”

He
added that “we have a tendency sometimes to take for granted or think
it’s normal” that so many young people have been locked up for drug
crimes. “It’s not normal,” he said. “It’s not what happens in other
countries. What is normal is teenagers doing stupid things. What is
normal is young people who make mistakes.”

If they had the same advantages he and others have had, Mr. Obama added, they “could be thriving in the way we are.”

Still,
he made a distinction between nonviolent drug offenders like those he
was introduced to here and other criminals guilty of crimes like murder,
rape and assault. “There are people who need to be in prison,” Mr.
Obama said. “I don’t have tolerance for violent criminals; many of them
may have made mistakes, but we need to keep our communities safe.”

More
than 2.2 million Americans are behind bars, and one study found that
the size of the state and federal prison population is seven times what
it was 40 years ago. Although the United States makes up less than 5
percent of the world’s population, it has more than 20 percent of its
prison population